Tag Archives: knitting

Ravelry 101

2 Replies

ravelry login screenIf you’re into knitting and have been near a computer for more than a hot minute, you’ve probably heard about Ravelry.  It’s sort of a Facebook for knitters.  But it’s sooo much more useful than that (Facebook is kind of dumb… don’t shoot me).

Ravelry is free to sign up for, and they don’t send spam or anything.  If you’re even vaguely interested in knitting or crocheting, you should sign up for an account.

There are about a million things that you can do with Ravelry, but I use it mainly for a couple things:

  1. Keeping track of finished projects.  If you’re anything like me, half of what you make goes to friends and family across the country and you never see it again.  Taking pictures of your finished and uploading them to Ravelry gives you a nice trip down memory lane and a great sense of accomplishment.  Also, filling out the yarn/needles/size info can be helpful if you ever want to make a project again.
  2. Talking to other knitters.  This is especially useful if you’re in a small town without a big knitting community, or if you’re teaching yourself by watching YouTube videos (and reading my blog!).  Have a problem with a pattern?  Questions about learning to spin?  Wrestling with a particularly nasty cable pattern?  Post your questions to one of the groups, and people will totally help you out.  Or, you can use the Ravelry groups as a way to totally geek out about whatever it is that you geek out about.  Is it Doctor Who or Harry Potter?  Maybe you’re really into gardening?  Or stock car racing?  There is a group for you.
  3. Finding new patterns.  Ravelry has the biggest searchable database of patterns.  You can sort by almost anything you want.  Want a women’s drop shoulder cardigan on size 3 needles with cables?  You can totally search for that.  Looking for a toy squirrel that uses short row shaping?  You can find that too.  (I’ll show you more about searching on Ravelry on Wednesday.)

So, my point is.  Ravelry:  try it.  It’s a great resource.  You don’t have to use everything, but I guarantee that there is something that it does that you would appreciate.

(FYI,  Ravelry didn’t pay me for this review.  But if they wanted to send me some yarn or something, I would totally be ok with that.)

Yikes! Stripes!

4 Replies

I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got socks on the brain.  They are possibly my favorite project to work on when I’m looking for something easy, portable and fun.  But, sometimes having a million plain socks gets boring, so sometimes I mix it up, and use self-striping sock yarn.  Lots of brands carry self-striping sock yarn, and when you buy it, it just looks like regular variegated sock yarn (except that the label will have the word “stripe” on it…duh):

But, when you knit your socks, you magically end up with beautifully striped socks with absolutely no effort on your part!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Pretty awesome, right?

So, how do they do it?  Basically the yarn company figures out how much yarn the average knitter uses for every row when she makes her socks.  Then, they dye the yarn in row-long increments, so that each row is a different color.  So, for example, if it takes 1 yard of yarn to knit 1 row, they might dye the yarn sow that 5 yards are blue, then 5 yards are green.  This means that in the finished sock, you will end up with a 5 row stripe of blue followed by a 5 row stripe of green.  Pretty clever!

Reader’s Choice

1 Reply

uncle-sam

I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I’d love to hear from you, my readers (assuming that you’re out there).  So far, I’ve pretty much been writing about whatever strikes my fancy, without much planning.  So, I have questions:

What would you like to see more of?  What would you like to see less of?  Do you have any burning questions?  Is there a pattern that you need help with? Is there anything you want to know about me? (Or, preferably, my knitting?  I’m not a huge over-sharer.)  Have you heard about some cool new technique or fiber that you would like to hear more about?  Is there something knitting-related (or totally unrelated) that you’d like my input on?  Do you have an idea for an Inspiration post?

I have some pretty cool stuff on deck (ie.  in my brain.  I just haven’t written the posts yet).  But, let me know if I’m missing something!  I’m here to serve!

Contact me through the comments section, or you can email me at knittingontheneedles@gmail.com, if you want to be all secret-like.

From the Back of a Galloping Jackass

Leave a reply

I am a total perfectionist.  Guilty.

“But wait,” you say.  “I’ve seen typos and mistakes on this blog, and that one post has the wrong pictures, and I’m pretty sure that the third sentence in the second paragraph in your fifth post used the subjunctive mood where you should have used the indicative.”

To which I say,  “Oh crap, let me go back and fix that.”

When it comes to knitting, I’m even worse.  I am merciless with my knitting.  I’ll unravel an entire sweater if I don’t like how a cast-on edge is laying.  It drives my husband nuts.  He’ll shudder and yell “No!” when he sees me start to frog* a project.  But, if I know a project is so messed up, ill-fitting, or just plain wrong to wear on a regular basis, I have no trouble ripping up a project and re-knitting it until it’s perfect.

I do have a rule about when it is necessary to frog a project, though (although if you ask my husband, he’d probably say that I can’t finish a project without ripping it out at least once).  This gem of wisdom was given to me by a little old German lady who owned the knitting shop near my college campus, and I still use it today:

   “If it can’t be seen from the back of a galloping jackass, you don’t need to fix it.”

-Brigitte (I forgot her last name) circa 2008

Practically, this means that if the mistake isn’t big, doesn’t affect the overall fit of the garment, or falls outside of the most visible areas of the garment (for example, in the armpit of a sweater), you can leave the mistake be.

Unless you are dumb and a perfectionist like me.

 

 

*Frog-knitterspeak for unraveling a piece of knitting, because you “rrrip-it, rrrip-it.”  A dumb term, but don’t blame me.  I didn’t make it up.